Sunday 10 June 2012

BBC iPlayer Desktop Troubleshooting

A few days ago I noticed that the BBC iPlayer application on my laptop would not display the programme listing for downloaded programmes.

I went online to see that several other people have reported the same issue.

Re-installing the application made no difference.

Then I remembered that the external drive which I use for storing media files had disconnected unexpectedly recently, I considered that some files may have been partially written.  Sure enough, when I moved the most recently modified files out of the iPlayer repository the programmes lists started working again.

Update:
Without accidentally disconnecting the drive or shutting anything down in an abrupt manner, my iPlayer installation suffered a repeat of the programmes list problem again.

I'm too busy to bother tracing the exact cause, but if it happens again I will try to isolate what specific download directory is causing this issue.